Battle of the Century
It’s the central place theory episode. It’s easy to forget Boardwalk Empire is a show about a consumer service, what with the garrotings and cloven skulls and all. I bet there’s a piece going up on Slate right now, or better yet Grantland, computing range and threshold as applied to the Atlantic City booze business. Nucky Thompson, now that he’s officially retired, is free to compute his own range, or at least invert the principle. Which means packing some machine guns, like he’s in The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, and bustling off to Belfast. Owen goes with him; fortunately for Nucky they go by steamship not helicopter.
You’d think Nucky would make the same kind of self-exploratory hajj Margaret did, but he pays about as much attention to all the heritage around him as Ryan Bingham would. The show really sports being in Ireland, though; accents on top of more accents, excellent use of panoramics at the port, and the glorious scene where Nucky’s in the car and a shot rings out from the vacated estate behind him, like a Carol Reed movie or something.
Richard Harrow—are the writers trying to Joshua Speed him? Was it too late historically in 1921 for straight-identified men to amicably sleep together and mess the Kinsey scale all to hell? If there’s an archive somewhere for Jimmy Darmody’s letters and personal effects would we find confusing evidence about the prince of Atlantic City? It’s fanfic-y but when Jimmy said “he’s with me” and encircled Richard’s shoulders with a languid arm, my subtext reader opened up and said Ah.
What they did with the Dempsey fight is purely fascinating, and I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like it recently. Teasing it out as a prolonged plot point and then resorting to all negative space, the formally-dressed crowds around the radio, the call of the knockout blending over the end credits: that was like some really astute DJ shit. Nucky isn’t present for it like it’s his father’s funeral and it’s hard to say which is more surprising.
Esther Rudolph is such a hardass. I love it. When female characters are ballbreakers it’s usually not from such a woman’s pov, so it makes sense. You get little glimpses of what Esther probably put up with both to get and keep that job and she starts to look really exquisite. It helps that Julianne Nicholson has mad Samantha Morton/Natalie Portman vibes.
It’s about to get real hard to get a decent cheeseburger at AC luxury hotels. The glorified slaves who make them don’t have a CBA, and they definitely don’t want an extra round of playoffs. I like how Nucky, who called this tune, plans to improve their quality of life while also totally mercilessly taking advantage of them himself. It’s like when Schwarzenegger used to oppose gay marriage except when he went on Leno.
Nucky says he doesn’t like secrets and now that he’s secured relations with the Northern Irish, he kind of needs Owen like he needs polio. Oops. Too soon?
Paz is back on a milk carton. Have you seen this PPD candidate?
